In the first part of a new series on NetTuts.com, they started on the creation of a full web application (a Twitter clone). The first article covered the CSS and using LESS to create an interface. In this second post they get into the PHP backend, opting to create it without a framework on the first shot.

In the initial entry in this series, we took care of the UI-aspect of our Twitter-clone, called Ribbit. Now, we’ll begin coding the application in a number of languages. This lesson will leverage standard PHP (with homegrown MVC), but, in future articles, we’ll review other implementations, such as with Rails or Laravel.

They provide all the code you'll need, the database table structure to power it (MySQL) and the examples of a model, router and basic MVC stack to handle the requests. They help you make a user creation and login system as well as a few other pages ("buddies", "make a post" and a few others). You can also download the source from their Github account if you want it all in one shot.